Data-Compression

Tag: data-compression

SQL Server Page Compression: Should You Worry About CPU Usage Increasing on Inserts, Updates, and Deletes?

SQL Server Page Compression: Should You Worry About CPU Usage Increasing on Inserts, Updates, and Deletes?

Every time I share a recommendation to use data compression in SQL Server to reduce physical IO and keep frequently accessed data pages in memory, I hear the same concern from multiple people: won’t this increase CPU usage for inserts, updates, and deletes?

DBAs have been trained to ask this question by many trainings and a lot of online content – I used to mention this as a tradeoff to think about, myself– but I’ve found this is simply the wrong question to ask.

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Please Compress Your Indexes and Shrink Your Databases If You Use Azure SQL Managed Instance

Please Compress Your Indexes and Shrink Your Databases If You Use Azure SQL Managed Instance

Shrinking databases in SQL Server isn’t fun – it’s slow, it causes blocking if you forget to use the WAIT_AT_LOW_PRIORITY option, and sometimes it persistently fails and refuses to budge until you restart the instance. You only want to shrink a SQL Server database when you’ve got a good reason and a lot of patience.

If you’re using Azure SQL Managed Instance and you haven’t already used data compression on your indexes and shrunk your databases, you probably have two good reasons to do both of those things: performance and cost reduction.

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